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Also on this website:
Toby
Johnson's books:
TWO SPIRITS: A Story of Life with the
Navajo, a collaboration with Walter L. Williams
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of
Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness
GAY PERSPECTIVE:
Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe
SECRET
MATTER: updated, revised & expanded edtion from Lethe Press
with Afterword by Mark Jordan
GETTING
LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE
PLAGUE:
A NOVEL ABOUT HEALING.
CHARMED LIVES: Spinning Straw into
Gold: Reclaiming Our Queer Spirituality Through Story
About ordering
Books on Gay Spirituality:
Articles
and Excerpts:
Read
Toby's review of Samuel Avery's The
Dimensional Structure of
Consciousness
Funny
Coincidence: "Aliens Settle in San
Francisco"
The
Simple Answer to the Gay Marriage Debate
Why gay people should NOT Marry
Wedding Cake Liberation
Gay Marriage in Texas
What's ironic
Shame on the American People
The "highest form of love"
The
cause of homosexuality
What is homosexuality?
What
is Gay Spirituality?
What Jesus said about Gay
Rights
The purpose of homosexuality
Interview on the Nature of
Homosexuality
What the Bible Says about
Homosexuality
Mesosexual Ideal for Straight Men
Varieties
of Gay Spirituality
Waves
of Gay Liberation Activity
Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality
as Artistic Medium
Easton Mountain Retreat Center
Andrew Harvey &
Spiritual Activism
"It's Always About You"
The myth of the
Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara
Joseph Campbell's description of
Avalokiteshvara
You're
Not A Wave
Emptiness & Religious Ideas
Experiencing experiencing experiencing
Going into the Light
Meditations for a Funeral
Meditation Practice
The way to get to heaven
Advice to Travelers to India
& Nepal
Nate Berkus is a bodhisattva
John Boswell was Immanuel Kant
Curious
Bodies
What
Toby Johnson Believes
The Joseph Campbell Connection
Campbell & The Pre/Trans Fallacy
The Nature of Religion
Being
Gay is a Blessing
Freedom
of Religion
The
Gay Agenda
Gay
Saintliness
Gay Spiritual Functions
The subtle workings of the spirit in gay men's lives.
The Sinfulness of
Homosexuality
Proposal
for a study of gay nondualism
"The Evolution of Gay Identity"
"St. John of the
Cross &
the
Dark Night of the Soul."
Avalokiteshvara at the Baths.
Eckhart's Eye
Let Me Tell You a Secret
Religious Articulations of the
Secret
The Collective Unconscious
Driving as Spiritual Practice
Meditation
Historicity
as Myth
Pilgrimage
Next
Step in Evolution
Teenage
Prostitution and the Nature of Evil
Allah
Hu: "God is present here"
Adam
and Steve
The Life is in the Blood
Gay
retirement and the "freelance monastery"
Seeing with Different Eyes
What
are you looking for in a gay science fiction novel?
The
mystical
experience at the Servites' Castle in Riverside
The
Great Dance according to C.S.Lewis
The Techniques Of The World Saviors
Part 1: Brer Rabbit and the
Tar-Baby
Part 2: The
Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara
Part 3: Jesus
and the Resurrection
Part 4: A
Course in Miracles
The
Secret of the Clear Light
Understanding the Clear Light
Mobius
Strip
Finding Your
Tiger Face
How Gay
Souls Get Reincarnated
About Alien Abduction
In honor of Sir Arthur C Clarke
The
D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance
More
about Gay Mental Health
Psych
Tech Training
The
Rainbow Flag
Toby's friend
and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.
About
Michael Talbot, gay mystic
About Guy Mannheimer
About Dennis Paddie
About Sterling Houston
About Michael Stevens
Our friend Tom Nash
Second March on
Washington
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Coming Out, Coming Home: Making Room for Gay Spirituality in Therapy
by Kenneth A. Burr
Routledge, pb, 273 pages, $39.95
Reviewed by Toby Johnson
A Bifurcation in Gay Spirituality
All religions can be
understood to have two sides or aspects: the exoteric and the esoteric.
The exoteric aspect of a religion comprises the beliefs, doctrines,
rituals and cultural practices of the people as well as the hierarchy
and institutions that have grown up around the religious tradition. The
esoteric aspect comprises the “deeper core,” or “higher
understanding,” of the message behind the doctrines and beliefs, the
secret wisdom known to the initiates of the religion who have studied
and practiced further into the subtleties of the tradition, as well as
the mystical experience of oneness with the truth behind all religion.
Gay religion and gay
spirituality, too, have exoteric and esoteric aspects. In common usage
today, the word “spirituality” is often used to mean the esoteric in
distinction from the exoteric “religion.” Though “I’m spiritual” is
also often simply used as a cop out from paying any attention to the
interior life that is the core of religiousness.
Gay spirituality
then can mean simply the truth that gay people have interior lives and
spiritual interests, that they (we), despite having been so long
rejected and vilified by the religions, can be good people, want to
live full and moral lives and are “God’s children, too.”
Gay spirituality,
though, can also mean a certain esoteric wisdom and secret knowledge
about the meaning of life and the nature of God that the experience of
homosexuality itself can be understood to bestow.
There is a bifurcation of gay spirituality:
one side for the “masses” and one side for the “initiates.” This
insight is necessarily “elitist,” but it is a paradoxical elitism for
it places the most reviled of humanity in the privileged position. The
way to address the elitism is to understand it as moral obligation and
vocation and not as social superiority. As gay, we are not upper class
or lower class; we are necessarily de classé. This can make us outlaws or service providers; it can make us spiritual seers.
 Coming Out, Coming Home, written by Seattle marriage and family therapist Kenneth A. Burr,
is about exoteric religion and its response to homosexuality as a fact
of human life. It is a wonderful book. Burr is not only a therapist, he
is a Baptist minister, albeit a very progressive Baptist minister, and
his presentation of gay issues is written within a church context. To
some extent, the subtitle properly describes his effort: “Making Room
for Gay Spirituality in Therapy,” but that is only a suggestion of what
this book is. In fact, it is a statement of exactly how most of us gay
men and lesbians who pay attention to religion would want the religions
to understand homosexuality. Burr is a straight man, and he is a
right-thinking straight man who has correctly understood both what
homosexuality is and how the teachings of Jesus should apply in that
psychologically-sophisticated reality.
The book is based in Burr’s
psychotherapy practice and he writes with the sensitivity towards
clients’ concerns and priorities that go with being a therapist (more
than being a minister of an institutionalized religion with a doctrine
to push). He is associated with Seattle First Baptist Church, a church
that apparently doesn’t fit the Baptist stereotype. And breaking
through the limitations of stereotyping is one of his main efforts in
dealing with gay people who come to see him as a counselor: society’s
stereotypes and gay people’s own stereotypes about what it means to be
gay.
To break through those
stereotypes and to understand what gay people’s spiritual issues are,
Burr looked to his clinical experience, and to gather substantiating
data he conducted interviews with gay clients and congregants. The book
is a presentation of what he found, replete with case histories and
personal reports. What he found will ring true to all of who have
thought about these issues from the gay side.
This is a book that every
Catholic priest (and Pope!) and every Christian minister and
practitioner of any other religious tradition ought to be required to
read. Burr establishes gay people as good people most of whose
“problems” arise from living in a society that does not understand
their reality and drives them to be false stereotypes. He deals
forthrightly with the various biblical verses that are used against us,
intelligently and gently explaining away the anti-gay meaning they’ve
been given.
I just mentioned Catholic
priests, Christian ministers and practitioners of any other religious
traditions. One of the most refreshing things in the book is Burr’s
openness to other religions and other interpretations of spiritual
truth. He really breaks the stereotype of the narrow-minded Baptist,
and he does it with sensitivity and respect for all traditions.
This is how the straight
world ought to think about the gay world. Were it so, so many of the
problems that develop in gay lives would never have arisen. For gay men
and lesbians discovering their sexual orientation within traditional
churches, Coming Out, Coming Home would be a wonderful anodyne to the
venom they usually hear from righteous religious leaders.
The book is very much a religious version of Don Clark’s classic Loving Someone Gay (which, by the way, Lethe Press, White Crane’s publishing sister, has just brought out again in a 5th Edition). In the same way Loving Someone Gay became the bible of gay-oriented psychotherapy, Coming Out, Coming Home
ought to be such a bible for pastoral counseling. (Unfortunately, it’s
priced at $39.95 for the paperback and $70 for the hardcover—that’s
because it’s from Routledge, a very respectable publisher of high
quality books for professionals, good for the book’s professional
stature, but bad for popular sales.)
All that said, I want to
balance my enthusiasm for this book by sharing an insight about the
nature of gay spirituality which I had while reading it: there’s a
bifurcation of gay spirituality, that is, two sides to this discussion:
the gay side and straight side.
It’s right that this positive, uplifting, truly “Christian”—that is, Christ-like—attitude is what straight people should
think about homosexuality. But it is not really what gay people think
and it’s not what “gay spirituality” really is. This is a reflection of
the familiar phenomenon of gayness as a secret society that understands
a hidden subtext of reality that straight people just don’t get.
For Burr’s positive
presentation of gay life is the assimilated gay life that is dissolved
into being just like straight people. All the insights and
enlightenment that comes from being outsiders, from gender blending and
transcending conventional wisdom is missed.
I don’t fault Kenneth Burr
for this—in fact, I think he’d personally be open to this idea. (I had
an email exchange with him about this and he was really very
welcoming.) I think the failure to recognize the “secret” side of gay
consciousness comes from the clients and congregants whose lives were
the basis for his research.
For instance, the interview
subjects mention the Radical Faeries and the Body Electric (which Burr
cites in passing as evidence of postmodern approaches to spirituality),
but they haven’t attended such events and wouldn’t want to. The
interview subjects wouldn’t want to march in a gay pride parade (though
Burr himself did) because most of the people seemed freakish and that
isn’t what “pride” ought to be about. The subjects suggest that what
gay people really want is to have non-gay friends and be accepted by
straight people, allowed to marry and adopt children so they can be
normal.
I like my straight friends
too, but I must say I think they should be happier to have gay friends
than gay people are to have straight friends. In my experience through
the years, the kind of friendships I’ve experienced among my gay
friends and friendship circles like the early Gay Rap in San Francisco
and the Foothills Family in the Rockies and gay camaraderie at such
places at Easton Mountain and Gay Spirit Visions has been such joy!
There’s something special about gay men’s interaction—especially when
it is outside the sexual context; I think it’s because some people
never experience gay friendship outside the sexual context that they
long for acceptance by non-gay friends. This is a problem for our
community, and so coping with the sexual context is one of the ordeals
to be overcome on the gay “hero’s journey” and incorporated into one’s
spiritual vocation.
Throughout the book
there’s a subtle dismissal of gay culture. The various styles of the
gay lifestyle come off as symptoms of oppression that would go away if
gay people were just accepted into society as like everybody else.
This isn’t a false message
at all. But it is an incomplete one. And while I’d recommend this book
wholeheartedly to gay and straight people alike, I’d hope the gay
people also had a Harry Hay or Mitch Walker book or a Toby Johnson (if
you’ll pardon the self-promotion) to add the other dimension. Our
struggle to understand and incorporate our sexual anomaly into our
self-perception ought to bring a better boon than that we’re just like
everybody else.
That’s a parallel here to
Burr’s openness to Buddhism as another religion that people might
practice. It’s not wrong or abnormal to be Buddhist. God loves
Buddhists too.
But if you’re really
Buddhist and understand that Buddhism has seen beyond the mythology of
God to a higher perspective, Buddhism isn’t just another religion, it’s
an indictment and a challenge to the very existence of the religions
that believe in God. Of course, the good Buddhist would understand that
the person who says God loves Buddhists too is really expressing the
virtue of lovingkindness in a metaphor and would likely just laugh a
hearty Zen-laugh.
There is a bold proposal
expressed in the subtitle of this book—which is bold whether it has the
word “gay” in it or not—“Making Room for … Spirituality in Therapy.”
Clinical psychology and psychiatry generally don’t deal with religious
beliefs. The efficacy of SSRI anti-depressants, for instance, isn’t
dependent on the religious doctrines one believes or doesn’t believe
in. So when Kenneth Burr proposes to make room for spiritual issues in
therapy, he is expressing a very new-age idea. Prozac, etc. aside, what
one believes does affect
their mental health. That, indeed, is the point of belief. The reason
for believing in certain mythological/archetypal stories is that they
affect how you understand your life and reason for being. The project
of spirituality is to transform your experience of life by taking
responsibility for what you expect and bring about through intention.
The goal of the spiritual life is to experience “oneness with God,”
that is, to experience being in heaven now.
Gay people, in particular,
suffer confusion about what intentions to hold for their lives because
of their religious upbringing and beliefs. There’s a truly “hero’s
journey” we have to go through, obstacles to overcome and interior
monster we have to battle to cope with gay identity. The fact that the
Churches deliberately choose to vilify homosexuality—in contradiction
to evidence and the Church personnel’s own example—and interpret
ancient texts to justify anti-gay prejudice damages their gay members
self-image and life expectations. It spoils their spirituality; the
guides along the hero path pone is supposed to be able to trust are
lying. This undermines the Churches’ spiritual authority. If they are
as wrong about homosexuality as they are, why would anybody think they
are right about anything else? Getting over such religious beliefs is
an important step in psychological maturity. And, of course, the
education in what the Bible really says and doesn’t say that Burr
recommends as part of therapy is important to help religious people
transcend those damaging beliefs. But there’s more to it.
What I think “gay
spirituality” is is not just getting over guilt and learning to “come
home” to the Church and be as normal as possible, but discovering how
to understand the specific traits and qualities that go with being
“abnormal” as spiritual powers and vocations that give meaning and
direction to one’s life.
 The
goal of gay spirituality, I think, is to find for ourselves—and to
assist other gay people to see—how our homosexuality can be understood
as a clue and an operative practice to experience “being in heaven.”
Meditation and spiritual practice serve to reveal this transcendental
reality; they transform experience so that the world DOES appear and
BECOMES heaven now. For gay people spiritual vision sees how the styles
of gay life can be perceived as—and thereby transformed into—clues to
heaven.
Gay spirituality shouldn’t downplay homosexuality, it should sacralize it and find spiritual meaning in the patterns of gay life.
Gay consciousness has to be
sex-positive. If one isn’t strongly sexually motivated, one just
doesn’t come out and be gay. So gay people have a drive—and
psychological need—to explain sex and sexuality to themselves and to
enhance the experience by intentional practice. Hence, gay men’s
culture facilitated the modernized interpretation of Taoist and Tantric
sexual meditation practices that are taught in the Body Electric
Trainings. Gay-positive, sex-positive people will naturally want to
discover more layers to sex; we certainly see that in the way men
broaden their sexual repertory as they age. The “Bear “ phenomenon
demonstrates that. It is truly spiritual to include mystical
transformation of sex in that broadened repertory.
Gay patterns of free and
anonymous sex resonate with the mystical poetry of the Sufis and of,
specifically, St John of the Cross whose poem "On a Dark Night"
is about discovering that the man he has had anonymous “park sex” was
Jesus. For all of us, according to mystical wisdom, are Jesus and
Avalokiteshvara and God-incarnate to one another, and should behave so!
Gaydar can be an experience
of recognizing divinity incarnated all around us, an experience of
seeing God in other’s faces. Enjoying porn can provide an opportunity
to see God-incarnate pleasuring him/herself and others in the physical
world of human sexplay. A porn video is no less arousing, but is
transformed mystically, by remembering the porn stars are generously
sharing their sexual joys with you and showing gratitude by recognizing
divinity in their beauty and attractiveness.
The styles of gay men’s sex
acts automatically transform ideas about anality and patterns developed
in toilet training; this can relieve a whole source of neurosis, while
also, of course, requiring education in new, intentional habits of
hygiene. Gay and lesbian sexual experience is so different from
straight people’s because there is no thought—either as expectation or
as fear—of pregnancy. Sex is about something entirely different for gay
people. You have to have changed your mind about what sex is for in
order to function as gay. Gay sex allows us to be both “male”/active
and “female”/passive alternately, sequentially, even simultaneously—
transcending, in the physical act of coitus, the distinction between
the sexes; comprising, like “God,” both sides of human experience.
 Believing
sex is good and that God can be found in sexual ecstasy creates a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Thinking “Here comes God” as you reach
ejaculatory inevitably and “May all beings be happy, may all being be
free” as you are coming moves the orgasm beyond just a biological
strategy for spreading DNA or a glandular process for relieving
pressure into a practice of the presence of God and an experience of
higher consciousness. This is so-called “sex magick” and it’s a great
contribution of the Radical Faeries, neo-pagans and new-age homosexuals
to collective gay culture.
With sex and incarnation in
impermanent flesh comes death. It’s been the reality of sickness and
death that has helped awaken the gay community’s spiritual side, just
as, in the story of Prince Gautama, seeing sickness and death was the
motivation to flee his life of luxury and normalcy with wife and family
to seek Enlightenment and become Buddha.
The gay encounter with AIDS
in the last decades resonates with myths of asceticism, voluntary
suffering, mystical substitution and self-sacrifice for the salvation
of others—by both the "victims" and the caregivers.
Living without children,
living without dealing with the differences between men and women,
living with the ever-present question of who else is gay around us
(gaydar) and wondering who else sees it in us and whether that makes
them friends or foes and whether they’re attractive/attracted to us or
not (cruising), having to—or getting to—come out to new people all the
time—these are experiences that make our lives different from those of
most other people.
Living without children means living without a vested interest in the future, living in the now
where spiritual wisdom says eternity is found. Living without
reproducing—and still being a contributing, participating member of
human society and being happy and fulfilled—witnesses to an overcrowded
world that you don’t have to reproduce to be a full human being.
Living differently from
other people results in thoughts and feelings of difference. Because
there are so many negative messages in society—or simply the absence of
messages—about homosexuals and homosexuality, most of us grow up
confused and conflicted about our sexuality. This results in what, in
gay-oriented psychotherapy, is called “internalized homophobia,” the
tendency for gay people themselves to hold negative ideas and judgments
of what gayness is and of people who are gay, including, at a deep and
subconscious level, oneself.
In the way that spiritual
practice then is supposed to help people live happier, fuller lives,
gay spirituality necessarily addresses patterns of internalized
homophobia. So patterns, like thinking people are judging/laughing at
you behind your back (called, psychiatrically, “delusions of
reference”) or being especially sensitive to rejection (and such
self-defeating coping mechanisms as rejecting others first before they
reject you), feeling unwanted and unattractive (replicating throughout
life feelings of hurt from such events as being last chosen in
childhood sports team selection), sabotaging sexual and romantic
opportunities by acting neurotically or sabotaging your life with
alcohol and the wrong drugs—all these patterns need to be
recontextualized and understood. This is spiritual practice as
psychotherapeutic. Self-loathing is transformed into self-effacing
humility and virtue. Loneliness and bad fortune can become solidarity
with the oppressed of the Earth. Acceptance of your fate can be
meritful resignation to divine will and embrace of vocation.
With spiritual insight, we
can see that we resonate with the “karmic patterns” of a long heritage
of homosexuals and sexual deviants before us. We resonate with the
vibes of two-spirits shamans through the ages of ages of prehuman
hunter-gatherer culture; of ganga-smoking yogis and herb-, mushroom-
and cactus-eating ecstatics; of taboo-violating Tantrikas and heretics,
world-renouncing ascetics and incarnation-embracing bodhisattvas; of
wandering monks, warlocks, hermits and pilgrims; of witches, wizards
and magicians, Mattachines, mimes and messengers, scouts and wanderers;
of bon vivants, counterculturalists and vagabonds; of surrogate parents
for nieces and nephews throughout tribal millennia who improved the
children’s minds by enriching family life with extra adults; of artists
and poets and culture guides through the ages of evolution of
civilization. All these human vocations resonate in our lives still.
And we can mythically understand our lives in the context of the karmic
resonances generated by them—by all the homosexual men and women who’ve
come before us. We are an integral part of the evolution of
consciousness and we can understand this as spiritual vocation.
Talents of gay personality,
like style, design and artistry and, perhaps even more important,
sensitivity, compassion and drive to service, show us the virtues we
can and should cultivate for our spiritual growth. Our gayness gives us
a perspective on life and cultural convention; we understand the world,
other people’s lifestyles AND religious tradition from over and above;
we should strive to be visionaries and world-transformers. Our
attraction to same rather than opposite potentially makes us less
distracted and obsessed with duality; we are blessed, if we want to be
so, with clues to nondual vision, the goal of most of the world’s
mystical traditions.
Gay spirituality sees that a
frivolous whimsy of gay life, like drag (from Radical Faerie-style
genderfuck to stage drag and serious female impersonation, from
Halloween costume to personal effeminacy) resonate with age-old myths
of androgynous, bisexual gods and cross-dressing shamans.
With spiritual sight, we see
our lovers as reflections of ourselves just as God sees the universe as
a perfect reflection of Godself—perfect reflections, not competing,
complementary but ever-clashing, opposites. This is a very different
way to experience the world from the way most straight people do. And
the fact that some straight people ARE resonating with our gay
perspective is evidence of the positive influence we are having in the
transformation of human consciousness. This is a very different way to
experience the world than the traditional religions advocate: there’s
no battle between good and evil, no absolute distinction between God
and man, nature and God, nature and man, man and woman. This is a new
kind of religion.
Of course, to get to this
stage of creating your own gay religion, you have to have gone through
the “hero’s journey” of coming out. There is a necessary maturation
process-—learning the skills of self-introspection and
self-awareness—that goes with realizing you’re gay. Coming out is a
conversion experience. The effort shouldn’t be squandered by then just
going back into a closet of normalcy. That’s OK, of course, for people
who want to do it; we’re all free to be gay in whatever way we want
(that’s the point of this freedom!). But these skills of introspection
and awareness can potentially move you higher in consciousness to that
experience of being in heaven now.
Gay spirituality
means to see beyond church, religion and myth in an enlightened vision
that arises from your homosexuality so that you understand the clue
your sexuality is to who you really are and why you’re here. This
enlightened vision isn’t necessarily anti-religious; in fact, it can
rejoice in liturgy, music and art as the high culture forms of
religious tradition, but it does, necessarily, understand the nature of
religious doctrine and moral authority in a new, transcendent way.
Choosing to avoid the Body
Electric or dissing the Radical Faeries is missing interesting and
consciousness-expanding adventures; there is so much neat stuff that
gay culture has sourced for us in the past few decades, we should be
encouraged to take advantage of it.
There is an age-old notion
in “gay” subculture that being gay reveals to you a whole ’nother
reality that straight people just never see. There is a “secret
society,” from the shamans on the savannas to the Knights Templar and
Mattachine troubadours to modern gay-identified men and women,
who share a “secret,” a “unique perspective” on reality. This is partly
just hype, of course, homosexuals DO live in the real world with  other
people. But there is also a level of self-fulfilling prophecy to the
idea. This is the esoteric aspect of gay spirituality. And the esoteric
secret in all spiritual traditions ultimately is that you are one with
your God, that Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Avalokiteshvara, etc. are really
symbols of your innermost self, that “Thou Art That” (“Tat Tvam Asi”/”Brahman-Atman”),
that there is no God because it is all God. Because we “believe” in the
secret, we are indeed revealed it and our lives are better, more
productive and contributing and richer for it. At least that is what I
think the therapist should be educating the client about when there’s
room for gay spirituality in therapy.
I loved Kenneth Burr’s book
and I loved the insight into this “bifurcation of gay spirituality”
that the reading inspired in me. The insight itself is a revelation of
the “secret.”
Link to a You Tube video of Burr discussing his book
Note about the word "Bifurcation"
I selected the term
"bifurcation"-- meaning dividing into two or having two separate layers
or realities, being "Janus-faced" (in the expression of Arthur
Koestler) -- because I learned the term as a college student in a class
on The Philosophy of Science, taught by John Totten, S.M. at St Mary's
University in San Antonio.
A central idea in modern
science is what is called "The Bifurcation of Nature," a term of Alfred
North Whitehead's. It was used by the astrophysicist who verified a
prediction of Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity--that light was
bent by gravitational force--in a famous article called "Physics and
Philosophy" (Philosophy,
January 1933). Arthur Eddington posed the problem of whether reality
really exists in describing the bifurcation of nature. He noted that
his sense impressions and his common sense showed him that the writing
desk at which he was sitting was made of solid material that had color,
smell, temperature, etc. Science showed, on the other hand, that the
desk is made up of tiny spinning particles whirling around each other
at enormous speeds and relatively great distances between them; the
writing desk is mostly empty space.
That is, there are TWO realities. That's Eddington's idea.
A movie has recently been made called Einstein and Eddington, a 2008 British TV movie starring David Tennant (Dr. Who) as Arthur Eddington.
In the account of the intersection of the lives of these two important
scientists of the early 20th C., Eddington is shown to be an active and
open (but necessarily discreet) homosexual.
Isn't that appropriate? Part
of the gay experience is seeing that there are TWO realities: the
straight one everybody takes for granted as the real world and the gay
one that homosexual experience reveals. Gay consciousness gives a perspective on the world that is self-conscious
and
detached, emotionally / psychologically--and I would argue
epistemologically, as well. We see with "critical perspective," the
proverbial "grain of salt" that keeps us from falling for the delusion
that everybody else thinks is the world.
The same "bifurcation of the
world" appears in the thought of the great German philosopher
Immanuel Kant. Kant also was apparently a homosexual man. (See Toby Johnson's article on Immanuel Kant & modern-day gay scholar John Boswell.)
Discovering this two--or
more--layered reality is a kind of True Enlightenment, this is how to
understand God and mythology. This is how to discover that you are in
heaven here and now!
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